‘What you see here is a wetland without water’: how the datacentre boom is exacerbating Chile’s mega-drought

Google’s datacentre in Quilicura, Chile, which the company opened in 2015. It remains its largest one in Latin America. Photograph: Luis Bustamante/Guardian

The Andes mountains frame what was once a wetland – now a stretch of dry, yellowed grass. Rodrigo Vallejos, a final-year law student, noticed the change five years ago while observing the Quilicura wetland, on the northern outskirts of Santiago. One of Chile’s largest swamps, spanning 468.4 hectares (about 1,200 acres) and partially protected, was drying up right before his eyes.

“What you see here is a wetland without water,” says Vallejos, who has investigated the causes alongside activists from the group Resistencia Socioambiental de Quilicura. “I discovered that Quilicura is home to the largest concentration of datacentres in Latin America.”